Keyword Selection Tips For SEO

Michael Bergbauer - September 22, 2020

It’s important to look at many different data points before deciding on which keywords to target to drive Organic traffic. A great first step is to come up with a seed list of keywords by thinking about how prospects and customers would refer to your products and services. Start with broad / generic keywords, including what industry you are in and want to be known for to your target audience. For example, MoreVisibility might have Digital Marketing, SEO and Paid Advertising Management on our keyword seed list to describe our business and what we offer.

From there, grow those “seeds” into a keyword universe, which includes all of the thematically relevant keywords that relate to your business. The user who wants to find an SEO agency maybe doesn’t just search for “SEO,” they may use other keywords which are thematically similar, like “search engine optimization strategy,” SEO consulting,” “SEO copywriting services,” etc.

To help you grow your seed list, a good keyword suggestion tool that everyone has access to is the Keyword Planner in Google Ads. In addition to related keywords, the tool also shows search volumes for keywords and gain insights into their PPC competitiveness. Keywords that are competitive (and expensive for SEM) tend to convert at an impressive rate and they command a premium cost for paid advertising. This usually indicates that they are also going to be more challenging to rank for in SEO.

Once you’ve built out your keyword universe, it’s time to start choosing the keywords your website should target. To do this, you really need to consider the content on the pages of your website. For a page to target a keyword effectively, its content needs to reflect the topic of that keyword.  A page is going to have a really difficult time ranking for a keyword if it doesn’t actually talk about that keyword or that subject on the page.

Imagine your website is a textbook all about your business – and Google is the index filled with keywords and corresponding page numbers. When a user searches for a keyword you want to rank for, what page on your site should they land on to find what they’re looking for? If none of your current pages feel like a good match, you may need to create a new one.

If you’d like to discuss your keyword strategy and how it could be improved upon, please let us know.